About Me

Friday, October 21, 2016

Review: 1: 13: 7 EK TERA SAATH

HORRORahhahahahahahahaha!

1/2 star

Mini Review:

Set in pretty Rajasthan this tale of a palace haunting and murder is being investigated by a policeman. The idea is great, but the execution fails so miserably, that you begin to laugh at the over the top acting by the lead characters: Prince Aditya Pratap Singh who looks more scared of his dead wife’s ghost than enamoured by her, the girlfriend, the queen mother and other royalty… It’s howlarious instead of horror.

Main Review:

The Prince Aditya Pratap Singh appears on screen riding a horse (quite competently, you think, until you realise that he is horribly familiar, and you’ve seen him in Maharana Pratap the TV show). He’s wearing cowboy boots over jeans and a brocade Sherwani kurta. All this in the intense Rajasthan heat. He holds that,’I’m Hukum (Prince) and hence will look intense’ expression for ever. Even when he’s at the dining table with his America returned girl-friend and also with the police inspector.

He lives in Darbar Palace with his family - all ghosts, talks to them and even introduces them to the policeman. He is tended to only by a demented looking manservant (we don’t know why he gives the evil eye to the camera every time he appears on screen even after the movie is over), and his wife who cackles like a witch (you know that laughter from high school plays). Of course, there’s a spirit of Aditya Pratap Singh’s dead wife Kasturi, wandering around in whites singing a song and crying (that crying is just as fake as the cackle).

All in all, a tourist couple shows up at night and are killed because of these spooky goings on. That becomes the reason for the policeman to show up at the castle. What you wonder is why Kasturi needs to wander from room to room and walk on the ramparts of the palace searching for her love when he’s chasing after her and lives right there in the palace!

Before you ponder too much, an America returned college friend shows up, hoping to make the prince, her ‘Addy!’. Several scenes of touristy dances and open jeep drives and swimming pool frolic later, she persuades the prince to do something! Kasturi has been breaking chandeliers and mirrors and scaring the heck out of the girl-friend.

The prince loves his ghost wife, so you wonder why he agrees to get a panditji to do some ghost purification of the palace. But he does! And now we know why the movie is titled thus. Exactly at thirteen minutes and seven seconds after one am, Kasturi and other resident ghosts are put to rest by the chanting of mantras.

The prince then happily goes off to Delhi to party with the girl-friend. Before you can say, ‘What?’, ‘Why?’ they bump into Kasturi 2.0 dressed in skimpy clothes at a nightclub. He begins stalking her at college, on social media, even shows up at her home. The girl tries to say, ‘I’m not Kasturi!’ but the prince has lost it!

This is where the silliness becomes utterly laughable. The well-meaning girl-friend takes the Prince to a psychiatrist, who checks his blood pressure and announces, ‘He is Shitzophrenic!’

Yes, that pronunciation. You do not recover after that. But the half star this movie deserves is for the twist in the tale that turns out to be very clever, very ‘I see dead people!’ clever (The Sixth Sense). But it’s too little too late. The good idea of the film has been long dead.